Ebola 53
evidence of Ebola. Photographer Pete Muller
and I went with him.
Leendertz and his team, including a gradu-
ate student named Ariane Düx, focused on two
villages outside the city of Bouaké, a trade hub
near the country’s center. After shopping for
trap materials in Bouaké’s market, scouting
the villages for bat-filled houses, and paying
respects to village elders, the team assembled
their apparatus late one afternoon, in time for
the fly out at dusk. The traps were cone-shaped
structures, jerry-built of long boards and trans-
lucent plastic sheeting, designed to capture bats
as they emerged from a roof hole and funnel
them down into a plastic tub. Amazingly, the
system worked. At 6:25 p.m. on the first evening
one trap came alive like a popcorn popper, as
dozens of small gray bodies slid down the sheet-
ing and thumped into the tub.
For the next phase Leendertz and Düx suited
up in medical gloves, respirator masks, gowns,
and visors. With a naked lightbulb hanging
above their makeshift lab table, they began pro-
cessing bats: weighing and measuring each an-
imal, noting sex and approximate age, injecting
an electronic chip the size of a caraway seed for
later identification, and most important, draw-
ing blood from a vein in the animal’s tiny arm.
One well-aimed poke with a delicate needle, and
a blood drop would appear, to be gathered with a
fine pipette. Düx and Leendertz worked together
at close range, trustingly sharing tasks, and it oc-
curred to me that if she poked twice at the vein
and missed the second time, jabbing Leendertz’s
finger instead, he could have an Ebola-related
needle-stick injury. But she didn’t miss.
The blood went into small vials, for freezing
immediately in a liquid-nitrogen tank and even-
tual screening back in Berlin. A small fraction
of all the captured bats would be killed and dis-
sected, so that snippets of their internal organs,
especially liver and spleen, where viruses often
concentrate, could be added to the trove of fro-
zen samples. The other bats would be released.
If a blood sample from one dissected individ-
ual later tested positive for antibodies or viral
fragments, its organs would then be used in an
attempt (more dangerous and more expensive,
done only in a BSL-4 laboratory) to isolate live
Ebola virus.